


When You Were Young

by gin_eater



Series: Interstate Love Songs [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Incompetence, Explicit Language, F/M, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 02:44:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19820923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gin_eater/pseuds/gin_eater
Summary: A reunion the day after Reunion, complete with revelations, re-evaluations, and the realization that sometimes moving forward requires taking a few steps back.





	When You Were Young

**Author's Note:**

> Something with some actual meat on its bones this time.
> 
> For whatever reason, these two feel especially twin flame-y to me, and so reading up on McCree, I got to thinking about what a redemption-ish arc might look like for Ashe, since she seems to be sitting villainously pretty right where she is in canon -- which is great, but also, like, what would it take for them to truly reunite, and how bumpy would be that road, etc.
> 
> So this'll be a series of slice-of-life oneshots or short chapfics tackling the highs and lows of their working and being together again, on no one's side but their own (or so they like to maintain), possibly not even in chronological order, but of which this, at least, can be considered the first half of a beginning.

_They say the devil's water, it ain't so sweet_  
_You don't have to drink right now_  
_But you can dip your feet_  
_Every once in a little while…_  
The Killers, «When You Were Young»

Jesse McCree woke up with the whistlebelly thumps and skull cramps symptomatic of a truly masochistic night before.

His stomach was churning, his mouth tasted like Satan's asshole, and he'd passed out with his fucking prosthesis on, so his arm ached. And his head. And if he had to name the shade of red piercing through the thin sheets of sandpaper that had replaced his eyelids at some point during the night -- day? -- words like "agony" and "hellish" and "dear lord why" would have all been top contenders for the title.

Groaning, he rolled over, away from the light streaming in through his dingy motel window -- a window, he realized dimly, whose curtains Hungover Jesse could not recall Drunk Jesse having drawn.

Consciousness rattled through his brain like a bucketful of ice. In a jumble of action and no particular order, he jerked upright, winced, and went for Peacekeeper under his pillow, drawing the revolver in the same instant as the broad barrel of a shotgun prodded him, cold and unyielding, in the solar plexus.

Scowling before he could even squint one eye open, he raised his gun to the side, but made no move to surrender it completely. It wasn't, he figured, what she was truly after, anyway.

"Well good morning, sunshine!" Ashe smiled down at him, her voice pitched to that specifically Southern brand of cloying that did to Jesse's eardrums what her blindingly white hair-skin-teeth were currently doing to his vision. "Where the hell's my bike?"

"Aw, fuck me," he sighed, flopping back down on the bed and wishing he could just slip back into what had been a comparatively comfortable blackout.

"Kind of you to offer," she said, "but no, I don't think I will."

The barrel pressed harder against his chest as she leaned further into him, which was honestly comforting, given the circumstances. Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe was many things, but stupid was not one of them. Her balance in this position was shit, and she knew it, which considerably lowered the likelihood that she intended her coach gun to turn his thoracic cavity into a walk-ins-welcome rib emporium. She was playing with him, inasmuch as a 12-gauge aimed at his heart could be a game.

"Where's my bike," she demanded again, "bitch?"

Jesse glared at her, cut a quick glance at her gun, and with an irritation-fueled burst of energy, snaked his prosthetic arm around her waist and flipped her underneath him, wedging both weapons between them at a range that would have dealt some truly grievous examples of bodily harm, if either had actually been set to trigger. More alarming was the sour lurch in his stomach that accompanied the sudden action -- Jesse grimaced and swallowed, and Ashe shot him a warning look.

"If you hurl on me I swear on your mama's grave I will shoot you in the dick."

The wave of nausea subsided, and thank god for that, because he didn't disbelieve her.

"I'm good," he said. "Gotta admit, I didn't expect you to find me quite this fast. Don't tell me you were dumb enough to put some kind of tracking device on that bike of yours?"

"Don't tell me _you're_ dumb enough to think I don't still know you well enough to sniff you out when I really want to."

That, he _did_ disbelieve, but he let her have it.

He climbed off of her to sit at the edge of the bed, scrubbing his face with his hands while Ashe holstered her gun. Last night's second bottle of bourbon rested on the nightstand, miraculously not yet empty, and he uncorked it with his teeth before taking a drink, rolling his shoulders at the burn that chased the swallow.

"Hair of the dog that bit you?" Ashe asked -- awkwardly, needlessly, but that was the nature of the fragile ceasefire they'd somehow fallen into on the rare occasions they found themselves dealing with each other one-on-one in recent years: checking in on asinine, obvious shit as a show of … something. Detachment? Neutrality?

Jesse grunted, and offered her the bottle, which she accepted, staining the glass with her lipstick when she took a swig. The color, he remembered, was called Raisin Rage, because of course it was. What other color could someone like her possibly wear?

"Didn't know that seein' me upset you so much," she remarked.

"Don't get too excited; you always drove me to drink. One of your few redeeming qualities."

"Well, it's nice to know you still have a use for me beyond doin' your dirty work when you don't have the balls to rob your own goddamn train."

McCree sighed and rubbed at his temples with thumb and forefinger. Damn, he was tired. "Come on, Ashe, do we have to do this right now?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, is this not a convenient time for you? Would you like to forward me your schedule so I can be more accommodating the next time you get a wild hair up your ass to interrupt my business and run off with my property on your way outta Dodge?"

He took another drink, and while his stomach wasn't particularly pleased by that, the throbbing in his head eased off ever so slightly. "Be mighty nice of you, yeah."

"I am bein' nice," said Ashe, coldly. "But I can be a hell of a lot meaner. The choice is yours."

"Well, mark the fuckin' date on the calendar! Miss my-way-or-the-highway is givin' me a choice!"

"My way _is_ the highway. You're the one chose a life of hidin' in the bushes from every passing car."

Jesse chuckled. "We did it in the bushes once. Remember? Ended up with your hair stained all pink after from a patch of wild strawberries."

Ashe glared at him. "I remember how the bees fuckin' loved me till I could get a shower."

"That, too. They were even sweeter on you than I was."

Ashe shook her head. "McCree, don't."

"Don't what?"

"Fuck you, you know what, and there ain't enough bourbon in that bottle to make it worthwhile. So quit it."

He studied her for a moment, rancorous and cagey, the way she always got when all riled up, at least with him. It was practically her pageant talent that shit could hit the fan during Plan A of a heist and she could run all the way through the rest of the damned alphabet without batting a false eyelash, but throw his contentious ass into the mix and it was like dangling a red cape in front of a bull, and she had as much of a biological imperative to charge for it as he did to wave the fucking thing in the first place.

It scared her, Jesse knew; scared her and pissed her off and thrilled her all at once, had done ever since the day they'd first crossed paths at the junction of het up and horny, and for the full two years of their joint endeavors, he'd felt the same. They'd been attracted to and pushed one another to ever more ambitious, dangerous, and batshit fucking crazy plans because they were the only ones either of them had ever met who could keep up with each other, and in their reckless all-or-nothing youth, thought they were the only ones who could.

Possibly Ashe still thought that way -- or, more likely, dug in her heels against any other way of thinking. That was the tragedy of Calamity Ashe: a little girl so starved for attention that the woman she became was fucking terrified of risking its loss by grabbing for it any other way than the first one to have stuck.

She could be more, Jesse knew. She could be so much more than the biggest fish in a polluted pond, if only she had the gumption to pass as a littler one in the wider sea.

Or maybe he was kidding himself -- Gabe had said the same thing about him, a score of years ago, and Jesse was anything but certain that what he'd become was all that much better than what he might have been. Maybe he'd stalled out around the same time Ashe had, just in a different place: head down, thankless work, yes ma'am and no sir, one season at a time, going through the motions with no guarantee of a proverbial harvest that would do more than cover the interest on a loan payment. All his brains, all his restless youthful yearning, chomping at the bit for a life past the property line of the family homestead, and he still hadn't moved more than to now be standing on the other side of a different but equally fallow field.

Products of their raising, the both of them, bucking stock that would not, could not ever be completely gentled. They were the stronger and the weaker for it, both together and apart, but--

"It was always worthwhile, Ashe."

"Christ." She stood up abruptly, one hand going to the top of her hat as though the motel room's pitiful aircon unit posed a legitimate threat to its position on her head. "Just gimme my goddamn keys and tell me where you stashed my goddamn bike. I've got more important shit to do today than accompany you on your drunken little amble down Memory Lane."

"All right, all right, don't get your dander up," he said. "You know, if I'd wanted you caught, I would've bound you with somethin' a damn sight sturdier than rope. And I left you with the payload, didn't I?"

"Not all of it," she pointed out.

"That wasn't nothin' you could sell."

"Oh, it looked like a _lot_ of somethin' I could sell."

"So's B.O.B. That ain't how things always work."

She settled a little at that. McCree knew for a fact that she wasn't above stealing the nickels off a dead man's eyes, but even Ashe had her scruples, and trafficking in anything that could think for itself, whether it bled blood or oil, had never been a page in her playbook.

"All you had to say was that she was a friend of yours."

Jesse all but crowed at that. "Yeah, I'm sure that would've been the magic fuckin' phrase for you to let her go without a fight."

"I've let plenty of folks go without a fight. Just not you."

"That why you still got that picture taped to your tachometer?"

The color that rushed to her cheeks was quite the prettiest shade of pink he had seen in a good long while. Getting under her skin had always been a delightful pastime, but it was especially satisfying to watch it happen.

"You mean that picture that reminds me every day not to trust obnoxious wannabe cowboys with more ego than sense?"

"Yeah," he said, " _that_ picture. Darlin', if I'm amblin' down Memory Lane, you must be wearin' a trench in the middle of the road."

"God, I fuckin' hate you so much," she seethed, and Jesse sneered down at her.

"No, honey, what you fuckin' hate is that tellin' yourself that ain't ever made it true."

"You arrogant, back-stabbing, sidewindin' son of a bitch--"

He jabbed a finger at her face, stopping just short of the frown between her eyes, because it was either that or kiss her, and he couldn't rightly predict if his better instincts or his baser ones would win out if he did -- or hers, for that matter.

"Never fuckin' stabbed you, _never._ You're still fuckin' here because of me, because of what _I_ gave up to keep Deadlock in operation and your uppity fuckin' ass outta prison. Half my fuckin' life--"

She smacked his hand away.

" _Fuck_ your life!" she spat. "You really expect me to believe that one of you was worth the whole goddamn gang? _You?!_ "

"Yeah, that's what really gets your goat, ain't it? That they didn't consider you enough of a threat to be worth takin' down. That they wanted _me,_ recruited _me,_ saw somethin' of value in _my_ cornpone, lickspittle, country bumpkin ass, and nothin' in the spoiled little bitch playin' badass with her goddamn butler!"

"You are so fucking wrong, you couldn't pour piss out a boot with directions on the heel!"

"Then what, Ashe? Tell me, what the hell else was I supposed to do?"

"Come back!"

"Damn it, I done told you why--"

"Not for fucking Deadlock, asshole!" she snapped. " _For me!_ You were supposed to come back for me, because _you_ saw somethin' in me that was worth bringin' with you!" Each sentence was punctuated with a sharp shove to his chest, backing him against the wall, crowding him, until he caught her by the wrists and threw her arms back down to her sides.

"Aw, fucksake, Ashe! We both know you never would've just up and left the gang to take orders from a bunch of self-righteous white hats, even if I could've convinced 'em!"

"You're right, I wouldn't have. But I would've left to be with _you,_ because for a couple of supremely foolish years I believed that you saw me as somethin' more than a spoiled little bitch playin' badass with her butler. Because we said we were fucking _family,_ and that turned out to mean just as little to you as it has to every Ashe who ever shit out a kid just so they could slap the name on 'em for one more generation."

It was on the tip of Jesse's tongue to spit the tack that her her poor-little-rich-girl issues were neither his doing nor his problem, when Reyes' ghost again wormed its way between his ears.

_"Is this gonna be your legacy, Gabe? The farm has a couple of shit years, so you raze what's left and salt the fuckin' earth outta spite? Jesus, you really are like a father to me, after all."_

_"It's not my responsibility to fix your daddy damage, McCree. Never has been, never will be. And you will address me as Commander, until Morrison deigns to officially discharge me."_

And just like that, the shuttle shucked across the loom, and another hitherto incomplete shape repeated to become a pattern in the motley weave of his life.

He'd chosen his life, and she'd chosen hers, and embedded deep within both thumped the hot, bitter pain of not having been chosen -- pain, and the foolishly fucking human hope that, given another chance to choose, the one who'd caused the hurt might make the choice instead to stitch the wound.

He looked at Ashe, breathless and belligerent, the whites of her eyes grown hectic and flushed with frustration, so desperately angry, raw with it, and maybe she deserved it and maybe she didn't, but Jesse didn't want to be the grease on that wheel anymore -- truth be told, he never had; but neither had he ever reached out a hand for her to take without his own resentment holding a stick in the other one to poke her with when she refused.

Ashe and him. He and Gabriel. Gabriel and Jack. Deadlock and Overwatch and Blackwatch and Talon, lather, rinse, repeat. Cycles within cycles of betrayals and reckonings and endless fucking running away and being left behind, and every time one of them had said they were done, they'd been completely fucking full of shit.

And if there was a saddle that Jesse McCree had zero interest anymore in abiding, it was that one.

"You were more," he said.

Ashe scoffed. "Don't fuckin' lie to me, McCree. I know all your tells. You look stupid when you lie, and you always look stupid."

"Ain't lyin'. You were. I was eighteen when they got me, Ashe, _eighteen,_ and I'd never been in such serious shit in my life. I was scared, and I was ashamed -- that I got caught, that I let them use me the way they did. That part of me was fuckin' relieved about it. I may have helped to found Deadlock, but it was always your rodeo, you know that. I ain't a leader. Felt good to be told what to do and pretend like I didn't have a choice; felt easy. Fuckin' cowardly is what it was, and all under the bullshit banner of the greater good. How could I peddle that fuckin' snake oil to you -- _you_ \-- and risk havin' the best thing about all the awful shit we ever pulled spit back in my face? I couldn't. But it was _not_ for lack of respectin' who you were or what you were capable of."

Her expression would have been hilarious in almost any other situation, a mirage effect of confusion and incredulity shimmering across her face, wide-eyed and speechless as a hare in headlights as the words sank in, and worse, the sincerity behind them.

"... Goddamn it," she spoke at last, turning away from him when her voice broke on the second syllable.

She rocked on her feet, shoulders trembling, fists clenched and gaze shifting from the yellowed wall to the stained ceiling to the mass-market Southwest landscape repro hanging in its tacky brass frame. She shook her head, and this time, when her hand flew to her hat, it was to tear it off and hurl it at the floor.

"God _damn_ it!" she said again, voice snagging on the line between a shriek and a snarl. "What the fuck am I supposed to do with that, huh? Twenty fuckin' years and you think you can just… You _selfish…_ " She lashed out with one booted foot, kicking the chest of drawers so hard a sizeable chunk of its laminate veneer cracked off and rebounded against the door. " _Fuck!_ "

Jesse swallowed, unsure if what he was going to say next would send that same boot flying for his groin, and discreetly positioned his prosthesis accordingly.

"You could come with me now."

Ashe whirled, and only years of elite covert ops experience kept him from flinching outright.

"Do _what?_ " she asked.

He steeled himself and soldiered on, "You heard me. Twenty fuckin' years, you said. You've lasted longer than ninety-nine percent of the one. Your legend's solid, the gang's stable as it can get, the peace has held, and the framework for it's well-established. I ain't sayin' to pin a note to everything you've built and send it in a basket down the Rio Grande with your fingers crossed, but couldn't nobody fault you for namin' a successor and formally retiring."

Ashe stared at him as if he'd grown a second head.

"... You're serious, aren't you?"

It was a rhetorical question, and he took it as such.

She huffed a hollow-sounding laugh, and sat heavily on the edge of the bed, slumped with her forearms resting on her knees.

"You are out of your goddamn mind. You are crazier than a shithouse rat."

Jesse didn't argue, in part because he had finally managed to scandalize himself with his own audacity. That the fog obscuring his path for close to a decade had thinned enough for him to see something like signpost at the edge of the horizon was a wild enough feeling; that it might possibly bear her name was downright surreal, a chimerical crossroads of insult, injury, and for once, an inevitability that didn't also carry with it an underlying sense of despair.

Ashe fumbled at her cut, fished out a Zippo and a half-crushed pack of cigarettes, extracted one with her teeth. Lighting it proved more difficult, with her fingers too slick and shaky to get a good purchase on the flint wheel.

McCree grabbed his box of matches off the nightstand, struck one up and offered her the flame.

"Thanks," she said absently. He nodded, eased down beside her, and relit his own cigar.

She smoked a whole cigarette in silence, puffing deep and sighing silver, then lit a second one from the tip of the first.

"What about B.O.B.?" she finally asked, at the end of a lengthy plume. McCree wasn't surprised -- B.O.B. had been with Ashe from her first steps, and he'd be there until her last, barring an altogether different kind of calamity.

"Well he ain't exactly the most subtle of companions, but if he wants to tag along, we could figure somethin' out. We always did."

"He's gonna be a month in the shop, thanks to you."

"Relay him my apologies. I always liked B.O.B."

"And then what?"

"Uh... Well, I guess if he accepts--"

"Not B.O.B., you idiot. _Us._ "

"Oh." He shrugged. "Whatever feels like the right thing to do."

Ashe stubbed out her cigarette and ran both hands through her hair, like she was trying to smooth her own hackles back down.

"I don't know, Jesse, I don't… It's not that _easy,_ I can't just…" She stood up again, arms clasped, back to cagey, but this time more conflicted than combative.

"Look," he said, palms up, cards on the table, "you don't gotta decide right now. Took me twenty years to ask; if you wanna chew on it just as long, it ain't my place to be at a variance with that."

He got up and grabbed his trousers where they'd been slung over the back of a chair, dug the key ring out of the right front pocket and held it out to her at a distance, the way he might a piece of meat to a skittish coyote.

"She's two blocks east, side of Acuña Boys Tex-Mex. You might wanna fix your face before you take off; you look like an albino raccoon."

He relaxed, finally, as Ashe's expression snapped back to its natural state of looking annoyed -- at her surroundings in general and him in particular. 

"Keep it," she told him. "Too much trouble to explain to the gang why you're still alive the next time you make a spectacle of yourself on the news."

"You're only realizin' that now?"

"Lord, no. I set out fully intending to kill you."

She stretched up on her toes to plant a soft and softly threatening kiss on his cheek, then spun on her heel and made for the sink at the back of the room.

Jesse let that absorb a minute, accepted it as par for the course, and tugged on his pants while Ashe wiped at her eyes with a wet washrag. The skin around them was more pink than black by the time she was done, which did nothing to dispel the albino raccoon impression, but she did look calmer -- drained, but composed.

He bent down and retrieved her hat off the floor, and she let him situate it back on her head the way he used to, complete with a playful tug on her earlobe once he had it sitting just so. She didn't smile, but he could tell she was fighting the urge.

"I look okay?" she asked.

"Purely purdy," he assured her, and let his own smile quirk up one corner of his mouth. "Just," he continued, reaching around to toy with the shorter hair at the nape of her neck, "promise me you're not gonna ask to speak to any managers."

"Beg pardon?"

Jesse chuckled. "Nevermind. Old joke."

Ashe looked unconvinced, but let it drop outside of a hum of combined suspicion and disapproval.

"You actually gonna write this time?"

"I've written plenty. You just gotta know where to read it."

He winked, and she arched one well-groomed eyebrow, accepting the challenge.

They didn't say goodbye, not that they ever had before. Maybe that meant something -- or could, if only they'd let it, which was itself a damned big if, with terrible odds.

It was perhaps a heartening thing, though, that they'd always been pretty good at nailing the long shots.

**Author's Note:**

> Acuña Boys is a Tarantino brand, which felt appropriate for these little SpaghettiOs® Westerns.
> 
> Thank you for reading. ♥


End file.
